The title track of, and other tracks on, Acid Country reference this great land of ours, and how mixed and strange and downtrodden it can be. And, as befits a man who used to be in the sardonically-named Beautiful South, there?s a new song called Welcome to the South. ?I wrote a few songs about the South when I was bitter, and I think Welcome To The South is more a song about loss of Northernness,? says Paul.
This House, a classic Heaton domestic dispute set to music, which is, as Paul says, ?more your standard Heaton game, that normal relationship of people where neither of them want to be in front of each other in the house.? He is the master of the cranky duet. ?It?s the idea of ?acid country? that I?ve touched on as a genre; country writing does have a lot of those cranky duets. That appeals to me. Most country songs are written from one point of view or another, not in a conversational way and the conversational song is more interesting to me, not what we keep in our heads. What we say in tight situations, what we say in arguments very much expresses how we are as people.?
One of the pleasures of Acid Country is its musical confidence, a way away from the brassy soul of classic Beautiful South or the jumpy pop of the Housemartins. Acid Country has feedback, pop, soul, and, yes, country.